Microsoft's Midori operating system is still alive (and seemingly well)

It looks like Microsoft is continuing to incubate its stealth Midori operating system project. On September 18, a thinly-veiled Midori reference appeared on a blog of one of its team members who noted that the OS incubation project on which he works is actively hiring.

Shapiro hasn't been willing/able to comment on why he left. And Microsoft execs have continued to refuse to acknowledge much about Midori other than yes, there was a codename for an operating system incubation project by that name.

I've gotten more than a few reader queries about Midori. Did Microsoft quietly kill the effort? If not, what's the latest about it?

"My team's responsibility spans multiple aspects of a new operating system’s programming model. The three main areas are concurrency, languages, and frameworks. When I say concurrency, I mean things like asynchrony and message passing, data and task parallelism, distributed parallelism, runtime scheduling and resource management, and heterogeneity and GPGPU. When I say languages, I mean type systems, mostly-functional programming, verified safe concurrency, and both front- and back-end compilation. And when I say frameworks, I mean virtually anything you could imagine wanting out of a platform framework: all things XML, data interoperability (database, web services, etc.), collections, transactions, multimaster synchronization, and even low level things, like regex, numerics, and globalization."

There are no new hints about how close Midori is to debut or any new insights as to how Microsoft is planning to position it if and when it does go public. But at least it seems Midori hasn't fallen prey to the cost-cutting ax, at least for now....